AI and ML techniques are popular topics, yet there are considerable challenges to those that want to design and build an AI accelerator for inferencing, as you need a team that understands how to model a neural network in a language like Python, turn that model into RTL, then verify that your RTL matches Python. Researchers from CERN,… Read More
SystemVerilog came to life in 2005 as a superset of Verilog-2005. The last IEEE technical committee revision of the SystemVerilog LRM was completed in 2016 and published as IEEE 1800-2017.
Have the last seven years revealed any changes or enhancements that maintain SystemVerilog’s relevance and efficaciousness in the face … Read More
Almost everything that we do in chip design and verification was invented to raise the abstraction above schematics and polygons. Register-transfer-level (RTL) design, functional simulation, logic synthesis, floorplanning, and more fall into this category. Even the notion of binary circuits is an abstraction. Underneath… Read More
We have been working with Defacto since 2016 and it has been quite a journey. Putting an entire system on a chip is a driving force in the semiconductor industry. With the complexity of designing a modern SoC constantly increasing, new tools and methodologies are required and it all starts with RTL.
Defacto Technologies is an innovative… Read More
Earlier I blogged about IC and ASIC functional verification, so today it’s time to round that out with the state of FPGA functional verification. The Wilson Research Group has been compiling an FPGA report every two years since 2018, so this marks the third time they’ve focused on this design segment. At $5.8 billion… Read More
Way back in 2002 there was a study from Collett International Research on functional verification, and since 2010 the Wilson Research Group has continued that same kind of study with a new report every two years. What attracts me to this report is that it doesn’t just look at the installed base of one EDA vendor, instead it looks… Read More
A few times a year, I check in with AMIQ EDA co-founder Cristian Amitroaie to see what’s new with their company and the integrated development environment (IDE) market for hardware design and verification. Usually he suggests a topic for us to discuss, but this time I specifically wanted to learn more about the version of their Design… Read More
Verific is an unusual company. They are completely dominant in what they do – providing parsers for Verilog/SV, VHDL and UPF. Yet they have no ambition to expand beyond that goal. Instead, per Michiel Ligthart (President and COO), they continue to “sharpen the saw”. This is an expression I learned in sales training, habit #7 from… Read More
Verification Challenge
As chip design complexity continues to grow astronomically with hardware accelerators running riot with the traditional hardware comprising CPUs, GPUs, networking and video and vision hardware, concurrency, control and coherency will dominate the landscape of verification complexity for safe … Read More
In SoC design it’s all about managing complexity through modeling, and the models that make up IC designs come in a wide range of file formats like:
Even with standard file formats, designers still have to traverse the hierarchy to find out… Read More
